THE FERMATA

The life I want to live

There are several moments of realization and clarity in one's life. There is also the moment of truth. The moment when you finally see yourself the way everyone else has.

I had my moment of truth some minutes ago.

I woke up from a nap in anger. Instead of blaming the entire process on the trigger, I internalized the feeling and blamed myself. 

This is growth. 

For me, it’s a huge difference between who I was to who I am.

So this is my life. 

The one everyone has seen, sees and would still see. I can attest to how I am neither here nor there and I'm still trying to figure out a whole lot of things.

I wondered what everyone meant by "you've changed". I thought it was how happy I am now. It’s beyond happiness. What they see might be a whole transformation.

Maybe this growth is a huge bulk of letting certain people go. Or letting certain actions go. 

Certain people started feeling like strangers. I would want to connect with them. The more I tried the more distant they felt. That was an indication that I outgrew them and it felt like I was forcing the connection to persist. 

My to-do list went from wanting to achieve a thousand things to doing the best I can. The pressure to be the sun started to reduce and I don't mind being just another planet as long as I'm habitable and I keep thriving.

I went from thinking myself to depression to thinking myself to happiness. The people that said “you are your thoughts” said no lie. 

Journaling became something I looked forward to rather than the blame game it used to be. I went from feeling like a failure to embracing my little wins and patting myself for seeing the next day. 

Overall I learned the importance of pauses. I learned why blank spaces are a major part of every piece. Why poetry has a caesura and music has fermata. Why commas and full stops are major parts of every writing. Why football has a halftime.  Why there's sleep and why there are holidays.

There's a motive for every pause. There's a reason for every blank space, every punctuation, every halftime, every holiday, and every nap.

Every pause is a moment of reevaluation. A time to breathe. A therapeutic moment to see If you're in the right. Also, the moment to take in everything you have been through and see if you've not gotten to a breaking point. The time to break down and learn to pick yourself up. The only time we get to learn how to process what's to come. Either a loss or a win.

Taking a pause from everything was all I needed to know I wasn't the person I used to be. That person that would stare at the floor for reassurance, I guess I started to dig the floor up after 20 years of staring at it. I was curious, was my reassurance going to come or was staring just my escape plan from reality?

In between my pauses, I found myself searching for answers to a lot of questions. With every answer I got, more questions I had.

The more I found an answer to a reason why I wanted to keep living, the more I questioned if my reason was good enough. I questioned my vulnerability to certain people and I found that I trusted them at that point. Then I questioned my trust in them.

I questioned the second chances I gave to certain people, and as disproving as it sounds, I figured I did this because I must have seen something in them that made me. But what did I see?

In the end, I learned that I needed to take pauses without guilt. Step out and live life while letting fresh air into my lungs. Not allowing my growth to be the only indicator of my right decisions. Saying kind things out loud to myself. Setting boundaries and following through with them. 

Seeing people for who they are and adjusting my relationship with them accordingly. Accepting and embracing vulnerability even when it's terrifying. And overall being contented with exactly where I am now.

I want a life that even in years to come, I still smile with my eyes, still love the body I live in, believe in myself, still know that love is more than a feeling, smile in photographs, and still remember who I was and who I am now.

A life where my dreams become reality and the reality is worth living in. A life where I remember to take a pause when necessary. One where my pause is like a fermata, I decide why I want to take it, when I want to take it, and how long I want it for, without losing value or destroying the quality of my music(life). 

Yours,

Adetutu❤️